This is my last opportunity to write for the sports section of the Voice. I want to seize this moment to reflect on my experiences and what they have taught me about sports and my college experience.
Lesson one: Working for the Voice has confirmed the verity of the square table versus round table division that separates our student body. This is a very real component of our college community and defines the two tracks that a student may take in their social experience.
This divide is most evident for me in our cramped little Voice office. I am very much a square table sitter and I work on the section that draws the majority of its readership from the square table population. The rest of the Voice staff is majority circle table. This separates my section and the content we produce from other sections.
I have found that this separation between my section and the others isn’t a negative, however. In each of my three years at the Voice, editors from other sections have reluctantly edited my pages each week while I reluctantly edited their pages. No one is at fault in this interplay. This is simply the relationship the sports section has with other sections. Features may not show great enthusiasm to edit a story about the men’s soccer team’s loss to Ohio Wesleyan, while I may not be eager to edit a story on the philosophy department’s lecture that week.
I am truly glad that despite our mutual reluctance to read each other pages, we do read them. Working for the Voice has brought me close to people I may never have befriended or even met. It has helped me to bridge the square-table/circle-table divide, and I love traversing this divide every Tuesday.
Lesson two: I am a bitter sports fan. Even without my experiences working on the Voice, I knew, from my friends who often choose to support rival teams to all Cleveland professional sports teams, that I am bitter from the failure and incompetence of the Browns, Indians and, to a lesser degree, the Cavaliers. The Voice has allowed me to express my bitterness and rationalize it to our paper’s readership. I hate Tom Brady. I hate Steph Curry. Why? I hate them because they are successful and my teams aren’t. No, I don’t feel lucky to have watched Curry make 402 three-point shots in a season and the Warriors set a NBA record with 73 wins this season. I didn’t watch in awe as a 38 year old Tom Brady led the Patriots to a 10-0 start to the 2015 season. I only became more bitter.
Lesson three: I wish I would have been a bigger Fighting Scots fan. On our campus, students do not flock to basketball, football or volleyball games in the same way that students at other, often larger, schools do. This isn’t to say that we don’t root for our Wooster teams. Supporting our athletic teams in large numbers just is not a part of our culture. Upon reflection on my time as Voice sports editor, I realize that this is a regret I have. The men’s basketball team’s run in the NCAA tournament was amazing and many of us missed it. As a student body, we should engage in following our teams and invest in their successes and failures.